t 30 FPS, shouldnt it drop if unevenness takes place?
No not as such, usually youd see it that way bit thereds no guarantee. It shows how often it reffreshes stuff NOT how often is drops stuff. They are not related1
i really dont understand why the first onw looks smooth and the second one clunky, they both have the exact same codec.
size makes all the difference, See animation codec is a limitted color codec, its MEANT for animations that have few colors and big unicolored areas with no graduation. As such is great for its intended purpose but it sucks at everything else, which is the gerenral reason why theres more then one codec.
Actually I can see the animation codec smooth on my workstation*, but not the machine im on now. Aside from the slight temporal aliasing of your render.
Tough I suspect your actually looking at the temporal aliasing problem wich causes the brain to see a stroboscopic effect. Which is obviously not present in the playblast, and the playblast also has less color offcourse so it makes for a much more easily compressable file.
There is a possibility of a nother reason and that is if you have field rendering** and yoru player is set the fields upside down but that seems unlikely.
*mainy because of the ssd drives insane troughput.
** this I also wouldnt notice on my workstation because of the way its configured.
PS: do you render out stuff out to quicktime directly form mentalray? If you do then the thing is a bit moot. Its the sort of stuff you'd only do if you dont value yoru deadlines, and are suicidial by nature. I mean its just not healthy for anybody to do irrespectively of it working out or not.